Not necessarily. As SUVs leave the road, the road becomes more attractive to people like me (in Honda Civics). The ton-mileage will decline, but the mileage could go up.
Note that you should WANT all those people living in those dense alleged hell holes, to ride bikes, take mass transit, etc, so as to keep the prices low enough for you to continue living in the boonies.
The reason city planners are less enthusiastic about self-driving smart cars, is that these have not actually been shown to work in the field (e.g., Boston), and "smart cars" don't do that much for reducing GHG emissions, nor do they do that much for parking problems (*), nor do they do much for the constraints of "peak oil" (or rather, expensive oil). (*) When you're the one guy with a smart car that knows where the empty slots are, they help you with parking. When everyone has a smart car, all the parking is used, always, and there's not enough spare capacity in places like Boston, San Francisco, or New York.
The biggest possible win I predict from Smart Cars, will be if the cars facilitate carpooling and access to transit. Doubling up in a car gives you double the per-passenger efficiency. 50mpg is easy with one passenger now; 100mpg is hard.
In contrast, bicycles, and a bicycle-transit mix (bike to train, e.g.) are deployed already in many other places, and they work -- they address high oil prices, they address GHG emissions, they address parking, and their use, like almost all other forms of exercise, is correlated with a much lower mortality rate. There's little difference between Groningen and Cambridge/Somerville/neighboring, except that Groningen has 50+% bicycle trip share.
I am genuinely curious, what is it about the US, that makes us so certain that we're different? Consider Groningen, vs Cambridge. Both places have snowy cold winters, both are dense, both have intermingled housing and shopping, both have a mess of students. Parking in Cambridge is a horror. Why aren't more people on bikes? Judging by what I see and hear, the reason is that we're lazy and we're scared of cars. If that's what's so special about being an American, pardon me if I think we need to change.
A non-trivial number of us must want to live in cities, else real estate there would be cheaper. If you look at census data for blobs-O-people (50K units, or larger), a minimum of 1/3 of the US population lives in density greater than or equal to 2000 people per square mile. (This is a minimum, because the 25,000 people living in my town, are not counted, nor are people living in nearby, dense, sub-50K towns.) 2000 per square mile is Lexington, MA, complete with office parks etc. It might not be that dense. It is, however, the density of Assen in the Netherlands, where they manage a bicycle trip share of 40% -- so it's clearly dense enough for many people to get out of their cars.
You can also find other versions of this data at gapminder.org. Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban").
Commerce clause, which applies literally to most, though not all, flights in the US. I'd let them have that.
The nonessential status of driving means that the states CAN pass laws regulating it and restricting it. I have read, not sure I consider the source reliable, that bicycles are allowed on interstates in certain Western States because that's the only way to get from A to B. I would be utterly unsurprised to see the feds leveraging access to highway funds, to get states to pass various regulations governing driving (or, as they have already done, drinking).
You know, on the one hand, sure, they might. Do you think this is new to the FBI? They could also claim you were a drug smuggler, a child molester, etc, etc.
I'm kinda ok with giving the watch list guys the ok to proceed on a single human tipoff, provided that it is a "good one". The rest of the machinery I think needs examining.
Note that "driving" has a similar nonessential status. I've heard that bicycling is constitutionally protected (because it is much safer for other people than driving a car), but the only thing I am sure of, is walking. And, perhaps, riding a horse.
From TFA, "credible" single tips. A tip from a parent, giving details that can be somewhat checked, is more credible than some stranger on Slashdot.
I'm of two minds regarding the "what makes you think you're special enough to warrant tracking" POV. On the one hand, yeah, totally, a little more of that attitude would go a long way, not necessarily with regards to DHS, but certainly with things like "anti-terror" stuff being done in little podunk towns. It makes a ton of sense for NYC (target, multiple times), probably for Boston (airport two 9/11 planes flew from, plus the whole Mooninite invasion). But otherwise (excepting similar large/famous cities), no.
However, the way that computing and storage is scaling, and the sort of things I see happening now when I browse, all the time (visit the Acme Corp. site, notice Acme advertisements inserted everywhere I go), make me think that the premise is a little wrong. If not today, then soon, it will be not-that-hard to track several million someones. We already know that P(terrorist) is a tiny tiny number, and we also know that P(abuse of information) is a non-zero number, we have history for both of these.
AND -- someone will surely point out that abuse of information is not terrorism. Well, maybe. I think we need to be a little more specific about what we mean by "terrorism". It's not that much about the dead bodies, because in fact terrorists aren't that deadly. They're less dangerous than your bed, put it that way (check the stats for people killed falling out of bed). Cars (as others have noted) are probably 100x more dangerous (steady 30-40k/year), and cars aren't even that dangerous, compared to the danger of simply not getting enough exercise (kills 10x more people than car crashes, estimates I have seen). And we're pretty ho-hum about these orders-of-magnitude riskier things. So whatever it is that we don't like about terrorism, either we totally fail at counting, or else it is not the risk of death. And given a little thought, you can probably come up with ways to automate misery-making with tracking info.
Problem is, your source is Wired, and if what's at question is their journalistic integrity, that could be spin, it could be news. If he is in fact all the things that he claims, in particular founder, financier, and original spokeperson, his management style would not be that unusual, either.
And when I click the link, I find that the amount Assange is paid, is $86,000/year. That's not exactly scandalous -- the headline, while mathematically accurate, is nonetheless misleading.
Except it's all bizarro. The FBI has the drives containing the logs; presumably, they have the logs (see TFA). Who's being protected from whom? The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that someone is an information, either Lamo, Poulsen, or some third party that we don't know about, and that is what's being kept secret. Or, Poulsen is himself involved (Manning could have contacted him, right? Makes a hell of a lot more sense than contacting Lamo) and it has been suggested that life will be better for him if he doesn't release the chat logs. Maybe the feds would really like to go after Assange (duh), and the logs undermine their case. And, further, if the chat logs are all released to the public now, it will be difficult to (ahem) edit them before any trial, or to "lose" parts that might be useful to Assange's defense. (Given events of the previous decade, none of this would surprise me much at this point.)
It doesn't pass my smell test -- their treatment of Manning, the leisurely way in which they are proceeding to trial, and Poulsen's behavior.
FURTHERMORE, this behavior doesn't achieve the desired outcome from "protecting the source". Having seen this, would YOU leak information to Poulsen, or trust him to protect you as a source? I wouldn't. This makes him look like he's in cahoots with the FBI.
Yes, but... that sets up Assange as a relatively sane person within the organization, which is contrary to the spin I've been hearing -- that the other collaborators thought he was unstable or a big ego or some such.
No, no, the AGENT gets the iPad, it gets him location info (good) as well as a decent browser, he can access the database on the fly on house-showing days, and try to adjust his tour for better/worse showings. Because you know for damn sure his customers are checking out Zillow on the fly, right?
Most wealthy nations have some system of subsidies and benefits for the poor/jobless; are we really discussing whether to do away with these, and proposing that the outcome would be better?
We could certainly afford to increase our welfare spending -- it's a big chunk of our budget (overall, including fed+state+local), but other chunks are bigger, most notably our defense spending. In particular, the waste(*) in our medical spending, is larger than our welfare spending.
(*) Waste, measured either as money spent on non-care overhead, or measured as dollars/capita that we spend more than any other country with better results, or measured as %age of GDP spent on medical care compared with any other country with better results.
I'm curious, where to do you live, and what did they do? What you describe sounds completely unsurprising, but other places managed to make it work. Here in the US, we had a chance for a perfectly justifiable price signal ($.70/gallon was the cost of the Iraq war) that we could have added, but we chose not to.
Right now, we're in the middle of a snow emergency, unpleasant verging on blizzard (mostly windy, now). Cars are crashing into each other on the roads. You could ride a bike in it, without crashing, but for the cars; I've gone skiing in worse. Biggest problem is snow on my glasses.
When prices here (US, Boston area) spiked (in 2007, I believe it went as high as about $4.30), I think we started to see some change in behavior, but it was a relatively small fraction (adding 1 %age-point to the bicycle ride share looks like a lot to someone watching bicycles, but looks like no change at all in the number of cars).
I see it two ways. On the one hand, the Dutch did it in their dense areas. They always tended to ride bikes more than we did, but pre-70s oil shock, they were as car-happy as the rest of us, just not quite so far along. On the other hand, we loves us our cars, don't we?
However, if either we hit peak oil (meaning we get supply shortage) or if there's continuing development in China and India (meaning they compete to buy oil, and if they can get more value out of a gallon carpooling in a Tata than we do driving solo in an SUV, they will bid it up), or if we get seriously serious about cutting our greenhouse gasses -- if ANY ONE of these things happens, then gasoline is going to get real expensive, either as a price signal to reduce GHGs, or because of supply-demand reasons. And yes, there will be political heck to pay if it is a gummint-imposed price signal -- we're so much happier sending our dollars overseas.
If we were rational, everyone where I live, whenever they had a non-exceptional (non-medical) trip into Cambridge, would always take a bicycle. I have timed it, best case commute in a car is 20 minutes (plus parking and walking), best-case commute on a bicycle (so far) is 28 minutes (plus locking). You're never stuck in traffic, you're never forced to drive blocks out of your way to find parking. However, we're not rational, and we loves us our cars. These two reasons are why I think that the future belongs to smart cars, but we will use them differently -- if they're "smart", we'll have built-in assistance with finding car-pool buddies, just for example, because we have to strain at gnats to get from 50mpg to 100mpg, but that other seat (or three) is just sitting there vacant.
I'm not trying to be deceptive. As it stands, there's a variety of benefits for poor people, though welfare is substantially less generous now than it was. I have heard it argued, but I do not have references, that one reason people end up staying poor, and poor "families" end up being unmarried, is that the subsidies phase out relatively quickly, resulting in what is effectively a very high marginal rate on the first hunk of dollars a poor person earns. And, also, that some of the benefits, come with conditions that effectively discourage marriage. Some of these are simply income related -- if a new mother can get WIC because she is unemployed, but the father is making a little bit of money, they stand to lose benefits if they get married.
There's also, sort of, an economic efficiency argument. The current system tends to divide a lot of the subsidies up into little piles of monopoly money -- so much for food, so much for housing, so much for education (vouchers, if they do those in that locality), so much for medical care. Often the benefits are tied to a locality, for instance, a city. Someone with their economist hat jammed on tight, will say -- "it should be plain money, we should not be directing their spending". Not only do we have the overhead of dividing the money up into little piles, and then checking for "fraud" in how they spend it, it might be that they have a better plan for spending it. The contrary argument to this is that people often end up poor because they don't plan or don't make good decisions, so let's be paternalistic.
Sure. I guess my point is, if we persist in trying to keep carting 200 lbs of people around in 2000lbs of car, we've made the efficient transportation problem artificially hard. Whether we run the cars with oil, goal, electricity, or unicorn farts, it's going to take about the same amount of energy. If our goal is to cut our GHG footprint (which is what motivated Al Gore originally), I think it's going to need more than just "cars, but better". It's either got to be not-cars, or cars used very differently.
If smart cars cannot manage to avoid hitting cyclists, then they're not that smart. There's bound to be some transponder that they will know to avoid running into, and I am sure that every bicycle will have three of them.
Which is to say, not killing cyclists is a mostly-solved problem, the issue is whether we care to deploy the solution.
I've never understood the incredible attraction of a flat tax; it's not as if piecewise linear functions were what made filing taxes hard. The attraction, for me, of a guaranteed minimum income, is that all the income-indexed subsidies that we have, as they phase out (in a relatively narrow income band), act as a rather high marginal rate tax on working poor-ish people. That's a problem.
"Guaranteed minimum income" is just another way of saying "subsidies that avoid the phase-out problem". And the thing is, supposed the GMI is $10k , and then a 20% (marginal) "tax" kicks in at $50k. At $100k income, you're still getting your "minimum income" , but you're also paying the same amount in "tax". Money's fungible, people should not get all hung up about the labels attached to it, just figure out subsidies and tax codes so you have a healthy economy, enough money to run the government, and you avoid pathologies like the way current subsidies getting turned off in a narrow income band provide such a disincentive to work.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any forcing, except by our friend the invisible hand.
It's not much of a dilemma. Cars are needy and space-wasteful; you can put more people in a subway, track per day, than you can in a lane of traffic.
Not necessarily. As SUVs leave the road, the road becomes more attractive to people like me (in Honda Civics). The ton-mileage will decline, but the mileage could go up.
The people I know who work in New York, take the train.
Note that you should WANT all those people living in those dense alleged hell holes, to ride bikes, take mass transit, etc, so as to keep the prices low enough for you to continue living in the boonies.
The reason city planners are less enthusiastic about self-driving smart cars, is that these have not actually been shown to work in the field (e.g., Boston), and "smart cars" don't do that much for reducing GHG emissions, nor do they do that much for parking problems (*), nor do they do much for the constraints of "peak oil" (or rather, expensive oil). (*) When you're the one guy with a smart car that knows where the empty slots are, they help you with parking. When everyone has a smart car, all the parking is used, always, and there's not enough spare capacity in places like Boston, San Francisco, or New York.
The biggest possible win I predict from Smart Cars, will be if the cars facilitate carpooling and access to transit. Doubling up in a car gives you double the per-passenger efficiency. 50mpg is easy with one passenger now; 100mpg is hard.
In contrast, bicycles, and a bicycle-transit mix (bike to train, e.g.) are deployed already in many other places, and they work -- they address high oil prices, they address GHG emissions, they address parking, and their use, like almost all other forms of exercise, is correlated with a much lower mortality rate. There's little difference between Groningen and Cambridge/Somerville/neighboring, except that Groningen has 50+% bicycle trip share.
I am genuinely curious, what is it about the US, that makes us so certain that we're different? Consider Groningen, vs Cambridge. Both places have snowy cold winters, both are dense, both have intermingled housing and shopping, both have a mess of students. Parking in Cambridge is a horror. Why aren't more people on bikes? Judging by what I see and hear, the reason is that we're lazy and we're scared of cars. If that's what's so special about being an American, pardon me if I think we need to change.
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"?
A non-trivial number of us must want to live in cities, else real estate there would be cheaper. If you look at census data for blobs-O-people (50K units, or larger), a minimum of 1/3 of the US population lives in density greater than or equal to 2000 people per square mile. (This is a minimum, because the 25,000 people living in my town, are not counted, nor are people living in nearby, dense, sub-50K towns.) 2000 per square mile is Lexington, MA, complete with office parks etc. It might not be that dense. It is, however, the density of Assen in the Netherlands, where they manage a bicycle trip share of 40% -- so it's clearly dense enough for many people to get out of their cars.
Charts, pointers to data, here.
You can also find other versions of this data at gapminder.org. Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban").
Commerce clause, which applies literally to most, though not all, flights in the US. I'd let them have that.
The nonessential status of driving means that the states CAN pass laws regulating it and restricting it. I have read, not sure I consider the source reliable, that bicycles are allowed on interstates in certain Western States because that's the only way to get from A to B. I would be utterly unsurprised to see the feds leveraging access to highway funds, to get states to pass various regulations governing driving (or, as they have already done, drinking).
You know, on the one hand, sure, they might. Do you think this is new to the FBI? They could also claim you were a drug smuggler, a child molester, etc, etc.
I'm kinda ok with giving the watch list guys the ok to proceed on a single human tipoff, provided that it is a "good one". The rest of the machinery I think needs examining.
Note that "driving" has a similar nonessential status. I've heard that bicycling is constitutionally protected (because it is much safer for other people than driving a car), but the only thing I am sure of, is walking. And, perhaps, riding a horse.
From TFA, "credible" single tips. A tip from a parent, giving details that can be somewhat checked, is more credible than some stranger on Slashdot.
I'm of two minds regarding the "what makes you think you're special enough to warrant tracking" POV. On the one hand, yeah, totally, a little more of that attitude would go a long way, not necessarily with regards to DHS, but certainly with things like "anti-terror" stuff being done in little podunk towns. It makes a ton of sense for NYC (target, multiple times), probably for Boston (airport two 9/11 planes flew from, plus the whole Mooninite invasion). But otherwise (excepting similar large/famous cities), no.
However, the way that computing and storage is scaling, and the sort of things I see happening now when I browse, all the time (visit the Acme Corp. site, notice Acme advertisements inserted everywhere I go), make me think that the premise is a little wrong. If not today, then soon, it will be not-that-hard to track several million someones. We already know that P(terrorist) is a tiny tiny number, and we also know that P(abuse of information) is a non-zero number, we have history for both of these.
AND -- someone will surely point out that abuse of information is not terrorism. Well, maybe. I think we need to be a little more specific about what we mean by "terrorism". It's not that much about the dead bodies, because in fact terrorists aren't that deadly. They're less dangerous than your bed, put it that way (check the stats for people killed falling out of bed). Cars (as others have noted) are probably 100x more dangerous (steady 30-40k/year), and cars aren't even that dangerous, compared to the danger of simply not getting enough exercise (kills 10x more people than car crashes, estimates I have seen). And we're pretty ho-hum about these orders-of-magnitude riskier things. So whatever it is that we don't like about terrorism, either we totally fail at counting, or else it is not the risk of death. And given a little thought, you can probably come up with ways to automate misery-making with tracking info.
Problem is, your source is Wired, and if what's at question is their journalistic integrity, that could be spin, it could be news. If he is in fact all the things that he claims, in particular founder, financier, and original spokeperson, his management style would not be that unusual, either.
And when I click the link, I find that the amount Assange is paid, is $86,000/year. That's not exactly scandalous -- the headline, while mathematically accurate, is nonetheless misleading.
Except it's all bizarro. The FBI has the drives containing the logs; presumably, they have the logs (see TFA). Who's being protected from whom? The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that someone is an information, either Lamo, Poulsen, or some third party that we don't know about, and that is what's being kept secret. Or, Poulsen is himself involved (Manning could have contacted him, right? Makes a hell of a lot more sense than contacting Lamo) and it has been suggested that life will be better for him if he doesn't release the chat logs. Maybe the feds would really like to go after Assange (duh), and the logs undermine their case. And, further, if the chat logs are all released to the public now, it will be difficult to (ahem) edit them before any trial, or to "lose" parts that might be useful to Assange's defense. (Given events of the previous decade, none of this would surprise me much at this point.)
It doesn't pass my smell test -- their treatment of Manning, the leisurely way in which they are proceeding to trial, and Poulsen's behavior.
FURTHERMORE, this behavior doesn't achieve the desired outcome from "protecting the source". Having seen this, would YOU leak information to Poulsen, or trust him to protect you as a source? I wouldn't. This makes him look like he's in cahoots with the FBI.
albeit with a tone that puts many people off
Given who he offends, I view that as a feature, not a bug.
Yes, but ... that sets up Assange as a relatively sane person within the organization, which is contrary to the spin I've been hearing -- that the other collaborators thought he was unstable or a big ego or some such.
No, no, the AGENT gets the iPad, it gets him location info (good) as well as a decent browser, he can access the database on the fly on house-showing days, and try to adjust his tour for better/worse showings. Because you know for damn sure his customers are checking out Zillow on the fly, right?
Can't a real estate agent also be an Apple fanboi? Think of the usefulness of an iPad for that sort of work.
Most wealthy nations have some system of subsidies and benefits for the poor/jobless; are we really discussing whether to do away with these, and proposing that the outcome would be better?
We could certainly afford to increase our welfare spending -- it's a big chunk of our budget (overall, including fed+state+local), but other chunks are bigger, most notably our defense spending. In particular, the waste(*) in our medical spending, is larger than our welfare spending.
(*) Waste, measured either as money spent on non-care overhead, or measured as dollars/capita that we spend more than any other country with better results, or measured as %age of GDP spent on medical care compared with any other country with better results.
I'm curious, where to do you live, and what did they do? What you describe sounds completely unsurprising, but other places managed to make it work. Here in the US, we had a chance for a perfectly justifiable price signal ($.70/gallon was the cost of the Iraq war) that we could have added, but we chose not to.
Right now, we're in the middle of a snow emergency, unpleasant verging on blizzard (mostly windy, now). Cars are crashing into each other on the roads. You could ride a bike in it, without crashing, but for the cars; I've gone skiing in worse. Biggest problem is snow on my glasses.
When prices here (US, Boston area) spiked (in 2007, I believe it went as high as about $4.30), I think we started to see some change in behavior, but it was a relatively small fraction (adding 1 %age-point to the bicycle ride share looks like a lot to someone watching bicycles, but looks like no change at all in the number of cars).
I see it two ways. On the one hand, the Dutch did it in their dense areas. They always tended to ride bikes more than we did, but pre-70s oil shock, they were as car-happy as the rest of us, just not quite so far along. On the other hand, we loves us our cars, don't we?
However, if either we hit peak oil (meaning we get supply shortage) or if there's continuing development in China and India (meaning they compete to buy oil, and if they can get more value out of a gallon carpooling in a Tata than we do driving solo in an SUV, they will bid it up), or if we get seriously serious about cutting our greenhouse gasses -- if ANY ONE of these things happens, then gasoline is going to get real expensive, either as a price signal to reduce GHGs, or because of supply-demand reasons. And yes, there will be political heck to pay if it is a gummint-imposed price signal -- we're so much happier sending our dollars overseas.
If we were rational, everyone where I live, whenever they had a non-exceptional (non-medical) trip into Cambridge, would always take a bicycle. I have timed it, best case commute in a car is 20 minutes (plus parking and walking), best-case commute on a bicycle (so far) is 28 minutes (plus locking). You're never stuck in traffic, you're never forced to drive blocks out of your way to find parking. However, we're not rational, and we loves us our cars. These two reasons are why I think that the future belongs to smart cars, but we will use them differently -- if they're "smart", we'll have built-in assistance with finding car-pool buddies, just for example, because we have to strain at gnats to get from 50mpg to 100mpg, but that other seat (or three) is just sitting there vacant.
I'm not trying to be deceptive. As it stands, there's a variety of benefits for poor people, though welfare is substantially less generous now than it was. I have heard it argued, but I do not have references, that one reason people end up staying poor, and poor "families" end up being unmarried, is that the subsidies phase out relatively quickly, resulting in what is effectively a very high marginal rate on the first hunk of dollars a poor person earns. And, also, that some of the benefits, come with conditions that effectively discourage marriage. Some of these are simply income related -- if a new mother can get WIC because she is unemployed, but the father is making a little bit of money, they stand to lose benefits if they get married.
There's also, sort of, an economic efficiency argument. The current system tends to divide a lot of the subsidies up into little piles of monopoly money -- so much for food, so much for housing, so much for education (vouchers, if they do those in that locality), so much for medical care. Often the benefits are tied to a locality, for instance, a city. Someone with their economist hat jammed on tight, will say -- "it should be plain money, we should not be directing their spending". Not only do we have the overhead of dividing the money up into little piles, and then checking for "fraud" in how they spend it, it might be that they have a better plan for spending it. The contrary argument to this is that people often end up poor because they don't plan or don't make good decisions, so let's be paternalistic.
Sure. I guess my point is, if we persist in trying to keep carting 200 lbs of people around in 2000lbs of car, we've made the efficient transportation problem artificially hard. Whether we run the cars with oil, goal, electricity, or unicorn farts, it's going to take about the same amount of energy. If our goal is to cut our GHG footprint (which is what motivated Al Gore originally), I think it's going to need more than just "cars, but better". It's either got to be not-cars, or cars used very differently.
If smart cars cannot manage to avoid hitting cyclists, then they're not that smart. There's bound to be some transponder that they will know to avoid running into, and I am sure that every bicycle will have three of them.
Which is to say, not killing cyclists is a mostly-solved problem, the issue is whether we care to deploy the solution.
I've never understood the incredible attraction of a flat tax; it's not as if piecewise linear functions were what made filing taxes hard. The attraction, for me, of a guaranteed minimum income, is that all the income-indexed subsidies that we have, as they phase out (in a relatively narrow income band), act as a rather high marginal rate tax on working poor-ish people. That's a problem.
"Guaranteed minimum income" is just another way of saying "subsidies that avoid the phase-out problem". And the thing is, supposed the GMI is $10k , and then a 20% (marginal) "tax" kicks in at $50k. At $100k income, you're still getting your "minimum income" , but you're also paying the same amount in "tax". Money's fungible, people should not get all hung up about the labels attached to it, just figure out subsidies and tax codes so you have a healthy economy, enough money to run the government, and you avoid pathologies like the way current subsidies getting turned off in a narrow income band provide such a disincentive to work.
do please mod parent up, he said exactly what I wanted to say (so of course he deserves to be modded up :-)